Category Archives: vSphere

An error that I came across when trying to deploy VCSA 6.5 on VMware Workstation 12I did face this error before as well but instead of troubleshooting, I replaced workstation 12 with version 11.For some reason I needed to switch to VMware Workstation 12 and here the error shows up again!

As everything is real world has time limit, so does the HDD in my Synology DS1515+, one HDD failed and lost all of the entertainment media.
1515+ got 5 drive bays and had to use a single HDD for entertainment, truth is non of the data I put on synology really matters as its for vmware vSphere HomeLab!

Anyways, stories aside.

Got 2 x Kingston v300 240GB SSD for R/W cache to speed up my Lab. Though 240GB is not listed on Synology compatibility list, but 120GB v300 is listed here.

The Firmware is also different than what is listed for 120Gb v300 (FW: 605ABBF2)
SSD that I got are running on FW: 603ABBF0

I will not go into much details about the IOPS, throughput and all that.
What matters to me is that VM performance has improved to a good extent, nothing jaw dropping, but yes Guest OS is responding fast as compared to before. Got what I was expecting.

One thing that I noticed when using “SSD Cache Advisor” on Synology that I gives a vague message “The memory on your Synology NAS is full so it is not possible to create SSD cache” Though I have 8GB memory installed.
I ran Advisor with/without installed into bays. But it did finally create Cache volume.

There is requirement about RAM that you can read on Synology website here.

I am using vSphere 5.1 and SQL Server 2008 R2, maybe soon I will work on 5.5 and SQL 2012 scenario and will update.
As mentioned I have a vCenter 5.1 server and a standalone SQL Server 2008 R2 in lab with 2 ESXi Hosts, these hosts are part of a cluster and connected to a distributed switch.

We will start with preparing SQL Server 2008 R2.1. Configure Ports:
Using SQL Server configuration manager, we will change the dynamic port to static. Remove any entry present in IP1 “TCP Dynamic Ports” and enter 1433 for “TCP Port”. Same changes in IPAll (scroll down to end), after the changes are done we need to restart the SQL service.Continue reading →